Sports are that weird beast where if you root for a team because they awesome with a great coach and great players and win a lot you are considered a dupe and disingenuous.
But if you were born in proximity to where the team practices or if your dad liked them, you are a noble and principled fan even if the team is hot garbage, their coach is a moron and they lose all the time.
If one were to pick any other product, movie, car, etc., like this you'd be considered wholesale insane.
This brings up two observations... neither is original...
1) Are you a millennial? I ask because millennials are infamously - and intelligently - impervious to brand loyalty.
I'm not particularly brand-loyal, but I do admit that to me, there's Sam Adams (and maybe their light Boston lager,) then there's fru-fru Sam Adams flavors and all other "craft beers," then there's mule piss, AKA your Buds, Bud Lights, Coors, etc., which all taste disturbingly similar (although this is only a consideration for the first few, after which there are two flavors, "more" and "I'm going to throw up.") Beer brand loyalty might or might not be an exception... but people my age (in my 50s) pick a product and stick with it much more than millennials do - even when it makes no sense, or at least less sense. My wife is in her 60s and is even more in this habit. You only need 1 brand of mayonnaise, 1 kind of mustard (yellow, usually French's) etc.
So one of the ways that I think millennials are amazing is that they're not brand-loyal - perhaps sometimes to their detriment, but generally to their benefit.
Counterpoint: Eliminating brand loyalty probably ties into the stereotype of mistrust of elders, authorities, organizations, etc. You can end up re-inventing a lot of wheels that way... and boy have we old folks seen a lot of "kids" come through our offices with breakthrough ideas that have been tried and discarded. Counter-counterpoint: But we also can't see how it's different now (i.e., we're immigrants, not natives, to the technology millennials grew up using.)
Also, unfiltered information products are unfiltered information products. This should be understood in both its negative and its positive implications, when you're considering whether the brand is significant. A Russian botnet and a professional journalist will deliver somewhat different products.
2) The other thing is, however rational or irrational we are elsewhere in life, we're completely irrational when we describe ourselves as fans. It's short for
fanatic.
So no, I can't say someone's a Pats fan if he shopped for the best team around, and will ditch the team if things get tough - the apparently rational approach, which assumes that one will always reap the emotional highs of good seasons, and never suffer through runs of poor performance.
The catch is that the emotional payback of team loyalty (1) underlies the concept of fanhood, and more usefully, (2) is far superior when you go from bad to good, than when you go from good to great to good to great etc. That's why I wrote to millennials, to encourage the ones with the emotional equipment to hang with the team if bad times come again... and try to impart the thrill of all those memories culminating in this dynasty.
You won't have the same series of events no matter what happens, from here on in.... but I wanted to impart the value of being a fan.
People who do the apparently rational thing and root for the next team with an awesome coach and awesome players are not likely to experience the same highs, being unwilling or unable to abide the lows.
Also, look on the bright side: You can fearlessly gripe about coaching and management when your team sucks. Right now, if you want to ***** about the team's defensive philosophy, its playcalling, its drafting, etc., it's a free country... but the null hypothesis right now is "In Bill We Trust." It's a heavy lift.
Nobody ever said "In **** MacPherson We Trust." Evah.
The suckier your team is, the more you can look wicked smaht when you scream directions at the television.
